Catching Richard Chichakli

For more than seven years after he fled his home in Texas, Richard Chichakli was safe. He was a fugitive, wanted in the United States, where authorities accused him of helping Viktor Bout—the Russian arms trafficker, sometimes called “the merchant of death,” who is currently serving a twenty-five-year prison sentence in Illinois—purchase airplanes, evade sanctions, and move money. In Moscow, though, he didn’t have to worry about that; in Moscow, the Justice Department couldn’t get him.

But Chichakli didn’t stay there. He moved to Australia—and apparently not just to hide. He applied for a position as a federal officer, one with counterterrorism responsibilities. And though on the lam, he applied for the job under a fake name, Jehad Almustafa—one that all but guaranteed a pretty thorough background check.

It’s tough to know what Chichakli, who was arrested in Melbourne last week, after his real name popped up on a watch list during that background check, could have been thinking. Throughout late 2011 and early 2012, Chichakli and I corresponded frequently over e-mail while I was reporting my Profile of Bout for the magazine. Chichakli struck me as a bit of a paranoid fabulist and yet, as you might expect of any Bout associate, he has lived an exceptionally interesting life. Born in Syria, he told a Times reporter ten years ago that he was the nephew of the former President of Syria and the son of a former Syrian under-secretary of defense. He also claims to have been childhood chums with Osama bin Laden. He moved to the United States at some point, gained citizenship, and joined the army, where he received counter-intelligence training. (He posts his discharge sheet, along with many other documents, on his Web site, chichakli.com. At his old Web site, chichakli.net, he used to publish photos of food, including ornamental fruit plates he had created.) Upon leaving the army, Chichakli moved to Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, where he ran a free-trade enclave. There, in the summer of 1995, he met Bout.

The two made an odd pair, with Chichakli the voluble prankster to Bout’s more stern, measured presence. Chichakli would later describe himself as Bout’s “friend and brother.” He was also, according to an Interpol report, Bout’s “chief financial manager,” allegedly fronting for several of Bout’s companies. He eventually moved back to the United States and established an accounting practice in Richardson, Texas. Ten years later, federal authorities came after him, raiding his home and his office on April 26, 2005, in connection with sanctions levied by the Treasury Department that were aimed at Bout and thirty companies associated with him. F.B.I. agents seized Chichakli’s computer, bank records, flight journals, a copy of Bout’s passport, and more than two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds. Chichakli took off for Moscow days later.

Chichakli and I discussed the possibility of my flying there to see him, though the somewhat unhinged nature of our e-mail exchanges ultimately caused me to opt against it. He sent videos that he had posted on YouTube, featuring himself speaking into the camera. A petite man with a murine face, he proposes, in one, to expose “terrorist tactics” that the government was using to pursue, as he put it, “a person like me.” Bout cautioned against taking his rants seriously, though the prospect of Chichakli’s future trial, and the publication of documents detailing their business and evasion of sanctions, could prove quite serious for Bout.

Chichakli provided colorful and intriguing responses when I questioned him about the sanctions. One minute he taunted the Treasury Department, telling me that “going around OFAC”—the Office of Foreign Assets Control—“is easier than buying a hamburger at McDonalds,” and that, “You do not need resources nor even a brain to laugh at OFAC and its pathetic sanctions.” He added, “I think one can teach a Monkey to overcome OFAC and the entire systems of the U.S. government in about five minutes” And yet, later on, he seemed to be asking for sympathy: “[T]he sanction [sic] had destroyed my family, life work, and my business and that is because I was a believer in the constitution, in justice, and in the operations of the law—I never thought that what goes in the corrupt countries can possibly take place in the United States. Well, I was wrong.”

I pressed him, a C.P.A., to explain in detail how circumventing sanctions was easier than buying a hamburger. “That would be illegal—wouldn’t it?” he replied. “It is just like taxes, there are ten million ways to evade taxes but talking about them is a crime.” Bluster aside, it seems the sanctions hampered him enough that assuming a new identity and moving to Australia struck him as a sensible option. Now the question is whether his extradition will drag on (Bout’s required more than two years), and, if he chooses to fight the charges, what that trial might expose about the financial and logistical sides of Bout’s operation. Last year, Chichakli wrote to me that being targeted by OFAC provides “credibility and legitimacy” and makes you an “accredited and trusted friend to any entity that despises the U.S. government.” One can make a “very descent [sic] living solely because your name appears on OFAC list,” he said. “I can testify to that firsthand.”